1. Field
The present disclosure relates to optical communication equipment and, more specifically but not exclusively, to methods and apparatus for mitigating the adverse effects of dispersion in fiber-optic links.
2. Description of the Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention(s). Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
The term “dispersion compensation” is often used to refer to a process of substantially canceling the chromatic dispersion introduced by an optical element or a combination of optical elements. In addition, the term “dispersion compensation” is used in a more general sense of dispersion management, e.g., in reference to the built-in capability to at least partially control the overall chromatic dispersion evolution in an optical transport system. The purposes of dispersion compensation include, but are not limited to reducing the effects of excessive temporal broadening of short optical pulses and mitigating detrimental nonlinear distortions of waveforms and/or signal envelopes.
Dispersion compensation is an important issue for fiber-optic links because optical signals modulated at relatively high bit rates can be subjected to strong dispersive broadening/distortion. For example, without dispersion compensation, each transmitted symbol might be broadened/distorted so much that it would strongly overlap with and/or detrimentally affect the neighboring symbols at the receiver, thereby causing significant inter-symbol interference. As known in the art, inter-symbol interference can disadvantageously cause a significant increase in the bit-error rate (BER).